I Condemn. . .But
The worst form of evil
I wrote the other day that I cannot hate Gazans. I have no regrets about saying that. Ordinary Gazans are not the people I hate the most.
Hamas are not the people I hate the most.
The supporters of Hamas who celebrate the atrocities they committed and thirst for more Jewish blood are worse than Hamas. But even they are not the people I hate the most.
The people I hate the most are those who say, “I condemn. . .but.”
You say you condemn atrocities but you will get off the train should Israel not live up to your expectations for moral conduct during war. You were never on the train.
You say “I condemn. . .but” and then play the whataboutism card. What about “open-air prison? apartheid? occupation?”
Let’s turn around this whataboutism. Did you ever use “open-air prison” to describe a country that is surrounded on all sides by enemies who periodically have launched unprovoked wars? Did you ever use “apartheid” to describe the way that Jews were treated by Arab countries before Israel became a state? Did you ever use “occupation” while making it clear to Arabs and Muslims that it only refers to land acquired in 1967? Or did you let them indulge in drawing maps without Israel, to teach Jew-hatred to their schoolchildren, to chant “from Jordan to the sea,” and to use “occupation” to refer to every square inch of land claimed by the Jewish state?
When you say “I condemn. . .but” I imagine you saying it in 1948, as Arabs launch a war of annihilation on the day that Israel declares its independence from a colonial power.
I imagine you saying it in January of 1942 as Germany conducts the Wannsee Conference, articulating the “Final Solution.”
I have a dream:
That one day the Arabs and Muslims who condemn and express shame over atrocities committed in their name will outnumber those who celebrate those atrocities and express solidarity with the perpetrators.
For now, you ask only Jews to condemn or express shame over evil they have committed. You treat Arabs and Muslims with the soft bigotry of low expectations.
And you keep repeating “I condemn. . .but.” Those are the words that disturb me the most.
I guess I lean a little amoral - because my first thought was - how can Israel respond to this in a way that moves the needle on its precarity, that gets it out of the path-dependent rut so that this *particular* situation doesn't replay on an endless loop until demographics turn the tide in the Arabs' favor and do the work of eliminationism (an outcome, it should be noted, the left doesn't mind)?
For all its "idealism" the left seems very content with the status quo in a lot of dimensions. I guess this can always be cast as adherence to morality, but it has a grim dystopian character that feels off.
“You say you condemn atrocities but you will get off the train should Israel not live up to your expectations for moral conduct during war. You were never on the train.”
Should Israel not live up to any expectations for moral conduct? Would you not look to any objective moral judge in such an emotionally heated moment?
The answer is clearly yes, but the implication here is that Israel ought to get to choose the moral standard for its own conduct and no one will get to second guess whether its actions are right because of its conduct.
I do think that is wrong, and it is permissible to say I condemn, but you need to conduct yourselves in a morally permissible fashion.
Do we not get to reevaluate the US’s invasion of Iraq with hindsight and look at all of the civilian casualties and consider that the US may have been wrong?
I will be rooting for Israel to eradicate Hamas, “but” I hope with hindsight that the cost will not end up being too high.